Saturday, October 31, 2015

My hotel in Los Angeles had a small dive bar in the back. I love small dive
bars, so this was a nice treat for me. Business hotels where conferences are
held always have bars that are way too geared towards executives on expense
accounts and are sterile facsimiles of a good “joint” (see About Last Night for
the true meaning of a “joint”).

Just one example. The bar was small so it had a limited
selection of beer and wine. But the bartender was an expert on equivalencies.
For example, I ordered an Angel City IPA, but they didn’t have it. But he knew
that the Lagunitas IPA was closer than the Stone IPA in taste so he recommended
that one. He did the same with my friend’s wine order.

This demonstrates all three levels of customer service
empathy.

·He showed cognitive empathy in his understanding
of what attributes of a beer are important to a customer when recommending an
alternative.

·He showed affective empathy in his understanding
that this would be important enough to customers to warrant investment of his
time to keep up on beer and wine that his bar doesn’t serve.

·He showed sympathetic empathy in his clear
demonstration that this wasn’t a bid to get a good tip; he really cared.

As you probably have noticed, we focused EID this week on
the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society conference. The Proceedings are not up
yet, but I will make sure to link to the specific papers when I can.

Monday and Tuesday’s posts came out before the conference
started, so those posts are pre-con. Monday was about getting the most value
from a conference. The source article was not from an HFES member, but I tried
to focus the EID piece on the HFES meeting specifically. If anyone read it just
before going to the conference, hopefully it was helpful.

Tuesday’s article was about game training and decision making
bias. I was supposed to give a workshop on gamification at the conference on
Monday, so the post was supposed to be on that. But my surgery got in the way.
I think this was a good replacement for EID.

Wednesday covered the Tuesday conference keynote address by
John Nance. He is a world renown speaker and showed why at the conference. He
had lots of good anecdotes and videos to share. If you are interested in health
care, safety, reliability and agile organizations, or aerospace, he is a good
source.

Thursday covered the User Experience Day keynote address by
Chris Pacione from LUMA Institute. His keynote was on design thinking. But
rather than give the usual lecture, he broke everyone into teams and had us
doing a problem framing exercise on the walls. We decided to ask forgiveness
from the hotel afterwards rather than permission before because they have a
rule against taping things to the walls. We used poster-sized post-it notes, so
there was no damage or marks on the walls. No harm no foul, right?

Next week will feature some of the specific sessions at the
conference. The award winning papers, the design prizes, the on-site
competitions, and the other notable topics.I look forward to writing them, so I hope you are looking forward to
reading them.